Fairfax man gets 8+ years in prison for helping ISIL

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The Pentagon, one of the landmarks Qamar suggested the witness photograph (PHOTO: CNN)

Fairfax man gets 8+ years in prison for helping ISIL

The Pentagon, one of the landmarks Qamar suggested the witness photograph (PHOTO: CNN)

FAIRFAX COUNTY, Va. — A Burke man has been sentenced to 102 months in prison and 20 additional years of supervised release after he plead guilty to providing support and resources to foreign terror organization ISIL, commonly known as ISIS.

An FBI confidential witness spoke at length with the man, Haris Qamar, 26, and accompanied him to take photographs of potential ISIL targets in and around D.C. for a propaganda video that would encourage lone-wolf attacks in the area.

Qamar offered the witness ideas on what to photograph, like the Pentagon and other landmarks. In June, the two of them went together to some of these landmarks in order to get photos.

The witness told the FBI that over the course of their conversations, Qamar said he loved bodies, blood and beheadings, that he admired lone-wolf attackers and believed in suicide bombings “100 percent”, and described how he would slaughter someone.

Qamar apparently also described a video of a Kurdish person being killed, and said he liked the cracking sound the victim’s spinal cord made when it was torn apart.

The witness said Qamar also talked about how he had tried to join ISIL in 2014, responded to the ISIL publication of a “kill list” of U.S. service members by tweeting that Allah “give strength to the mujahideen to slaughter every single US military officer,” and the only reason he wasn’t able to travel overseas and join ISIL is that his parents had withheld his passport from him and threatened to notify law enforcement.

Two of Qamar’s acquaintances, Soufian Amri, 32, of Falls Church, and Michael Queen, 28, of Woodbridge, were arrested on Feb. 15 and charged with obstructing justice and conspiring to provide false statements to officers who were investigating Qamar.